Across the Obelisk

Across the Obelisk had been suggested to me before, so when I read The Zvi’s review (Spoiler free-review “Buy it”) I bought it.

The basic idea is that instead of having a single character and deck, you have four. Characters (and monsters) have inititiative but otherwise each turn is draw 5 cards and gets ~3 mana a turn. Mana is saved between turns (each character has their own pool), but you’ve get the gist. Some attacks hit the first opponent (in party order), some target anyone. There’s a ton of modifiers. Characters can have weapons, armor, etc.

“Slay the Spire meets Dungeons and Dragons.”

My abstract review after a few days —

Race for the Galaxy : New Frontiers :: Slay the Spire : Across the Obelisk.

Which isn’t to call it bad, just “not the classic that clearly led to its creation.”

Across the Obelisk is simply more, not better. It overstays its welcome, and I say that as someone who hasn’t gotten far into the second act. More characters make combats longer, but not more interesting. Less since there is now the strategy of “concentrate fire.”

More annoying are the tedious modifiers. A character/enemy has various resistances to slashing, blunt, piercing, fire, cold, lightning, holy, shadow, mind … numbers ranging from -21% to +60% in the case of a slime mold. With more characters you’d want a streamlined system.

For example, a ship vs. ship battle in Star Fleet Battles take ~3 hours. A squadron takes all day. You’d likely never use the system to deal with a full campaign if you were interested in the campaign, unless you really just wanted a system to generate combats. The point of Slay the Spire isn’t the individual combats. So in Across the Obelisk combat should have been even simpler (since you have 4 characters), instead of the opposite.

And most of that complexity doesn’t matter that much. Many of the modifiers are a few percent, which rounds to …. nothing. Great.

I first noticed this with Civ VI, which I played for a few hours, tops (as compared to years for Civs I and II). The ability of computers to instantly correctly track dozens or hundreds of small modifiers does not mean that it is good design. Better to have a few big important ones than tons of fiddly ones.

And if my warrior’s attacks are all melee, there’s nothing I can do to modify it in combat. If I can enchant a weapon to be either fire or cold, then I just have to pull up resistances and figure out which is best. Again, no bombs, just fiddly. The Spire’s enemies have few modifiers, but big effects. Here it’s just “Throw everything at the party.”

I guess this game is for people who thought Slay the Spire was too short and too easy.

I get the “too easy” criticism. Yes, StS can be beat after a few games (if you aren’t going for the Heart, which didn’t exist in the first year or two). But you can increase the ascension level until its challenging. Across the Obelisk’s problem isn’t difficulty (although at first glance it is legitimately harder, probably impossible to win without unlocking meta-scaling that you get between runs). The problem is tedium. When I played the first game, time did not fly. It’s airplane was grounded. From what I’ve read a full game is ~4 hours, and once you know it the first hour or so is rote. It’s like a worse Hades, in that you need the meta-scaling to win (at least I did), so early on the first hour is challenging but once you’ve “earned” it you still have to play the first hour.

This is not an improvement, because most of the time is spent micro-managing.

As Rock Paper Shotgun noted, what makes StS great is that you can (mostly) see what is about to happen to you. A typical example on the first combat is “A Jaw worm is attacking you for 12. You can block for 10 and do some damage or fully block but do no damage. The Jaw worm gets stronger (increasing damage) every 3rd turn or so.” That’s a choice. Here you can’t (by default) see what is coming, but you know the pattern. Across the Obelisk does make this a bit better …. after a while you’ll see all the cards in the enemies “deck” and memorize the order (if it is in fact fixed), but for the early game it feels random.

And many enemies have “Attack random opponent” as a card. So should each character block for 10? Just accept the hit? Some of the attacks are “Do this X times.” So if you have 4 attacks of 5 each, perhaps each character blocking for five works. But odds are one character will get hit twice and one missed. Guess who? And one character could randomly take all the hits for 20 (50-100 HP is what they have). A longer fight with more randomness violates my tenets of good design (unless the fight is the whole point of the game).

And in Slay the Spire, the fights are the micromanagement. The macro-management is which rewards to pick, which path, when to take keys. Etc. Across the Obelisk triples the micromanagement in combat, and in other ways. Consider the start of Slay the Spire. You pick a character. Then (assuming you are playing an Ascension Level) you get a gift. One of four choices. Pick and go.

In Across the Obelisk, you pick your four characters (assuming you’ve unlocked more) and then you can spend last run’s gold modifying their starting decks paying to buy new cards, improve cards, and get rid of cards. You can save your common setups and load them from disk, but its a big up front issue. I am reminded of Struggle of Empires, which has your most important decision when you are least likely to understand it, and then your options narrow throughout the game. Again, part of the joy of “roguelike” games is rolling with the punches, not a 10 minute setup phase.

All of which isn’t to say that this is bad, just “not the reason I play Slay the Spire.” Someone tried to mash up two things, but they weren’t peanut butter and chocolate. Neither were they peanut butter and anchovies. Its not disgusting, but there’s no synergy, so it winds up being an “This is OK, I’ll play it for a while, even obsessively for a few days or so, and then I’ll probably ignore it.”

There are a number of points I did like:

• Many of the random events give you a choice with the RNG being a draw of cards from a variety of decks (and you have to “roll” greater than or less than a mana total, or get a card of the right type….). More interesting than the purely random events of StS (like Wheel of Fortune, etc).
• Some events direct you to surprise mini-maps (at least on the “Adventure map” which is fixed). Perhaps this becomes more well known once you’ve discovered the game. Also, there is a decent bit of world building in the background events, but I assume that’s par for the course of modern games.
• Mixing and matching parties (from the warriors/scouts/mages and healers) probably is of interest (I assume, I haven’t unlocked other characters). Certainly when you get rewards, you get a chest full and each character can get one thing (or you can buy things from shops and allocate). This means that you have a number of interesting combinations and anti-combinations to beware. This does slow the game down, but in this case its because of actual strategic choices.
• Like Baseball Highlights 2045, there is a minimum deck size.
• When you upgrade a card, there are two options (such as “make it better” or “make it worse, but cheaper.”)
• If one (or more) characters die during a battle, but the party survives, you get a curse in that characters deck. A nice “death spiral” feeling.
• Some of the battles have an “Increased Risk, Increased Reward” option. Cute

Some minor peeves:

• The grunts whenever a character takes damage are annoying. I’d like to be able to just mute those.
• No “Skip the opening cutscene when starting a game” option. Yes, I can hit skip each time … this seems like an obvious option to add.

I’ve written this review after playing for ~8 hours. I doubt this will get to 100. Often I’ll play an hour of this, save the game, then come back and make a spire run or two, then resume the game.

Rating — Indifferent, in theory, but man I am playing this a bunch for how annoying it is, so I guess its a suggest?. More thoughts later.

Post-Script. After I finished my fifth run of AtO, I got an achievement for playing (not winning) five times. Only 56% of people who bought the game got this achievement! (Although that may actually be more than average. Cult of the New isn’t just for boardgames).